‘Blame Sue’ (http://www.blamesue.com) is a website fully integrated into social media, encouraging visitors to share what they ‘blame Sue’ for. If you’re not sure who ‘Sue’ is, she is the woman who Gordon Brown blamed for putting the ‘bigoted woman’ infront of him – and from this, has spiralled a massive social media following.

From a more serious view, this is media generated which is purely anti-labour, purely because of one mistake. This media will be more popular than any type of pro-labour social media campaigns due to its nature, which is detrimental to Labour’s efforts.

So far, Sue has been blamed for such things as global warming, 9/11, 7/7, cheating girlfriends, bad food, failed exams and more!

We love it, and I’m sure that the 80,000+ strong following do too – so, what do you blame Sue for?

Why not check it out yourself and share!

According to Marketing Magazine, a fan page dedicated to the brand will be the hub of their social media activity, challenging users to take part in their ‘What’s the worst that could happen’ takeover, tasking fans to risk embarrassing themselves by putting their status in the hand of the brand.

The fan page will be the location of brand based content, news and competitions, including the status takeover. Fans will also be given the chance to receive free ringtones which could be classed as ‘good or embarrassing’ free with their 330ml and 500ml bottles, knitting together their offline and online marketing efforts.

The social media activity will also be supported through TV advertising, as Dr Pepper plan to rerun a couple of their most popular past advertising campaigns.

Cathryn Sleight, the marketing director at Coca Cola GB commented saying ‘The Dr Pepper, ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ creative has a successful nine-year heritage for the brand, and continues to resonate strongly with our teen audience.

“In 2010, we’re looking to bring the message to life, giving consumers a personal experience in social environments and scenarios that are relevant to them, and appeal to their sense of humour.”

By introducing their tagline into social media, Dr Pepper are opening it up to interaction from fans, creating shareable content and viral potential – highly valuable within online marketing.

Coca Cola alongside Unilever will be taking their digital eye from traditional campaign sites which have hosted past campaigns aimed at bringing people to the dedicated page to raise awareness for their current promotions.

Instead they will be switching their attention to social media platforms which host a large number of their community, bringing the campaigns straight to their target market, without trying to drag people over to their campaign pages. The aim is to engage existing community’s right on their digital doorstep, providing content to share and interact with.

Coca Cola are planning on positioning it’s Facebook and Youtube platforms as the leading channels for it’s impending international activity involving Coca Cola Zero and Fanta brands according to New Media Age.

Europe’s interactive marketing manager at Coca-Cola commented saying: “In some cases some of our campaigns won’t need a coke.com-hosted site. In most cases these will still exist as it’s the most obvious destination for a consumer, but it might only be a page linking to YouTube encouraging people to join the community there.

“We would like to place our activities and brands where people are, rather than dragging them to our platform,”

This kind of activity may pave the way for other large multinationals use of campaign pages – it’s pretty clear that the integration of campaign pages straight into social media platforms takes the content straight to the people who care about it the most.

What do you think? Would you rather large brands such as Coca-Cola bring their promotions to you via social media, or do you prefer to seek out such activity yourself, when you want it? Is this the future for brands engaging their consumers?

The Sci-Fi epic is set to hit the big screen on December 18th, but before then their online marketing campaign is well and truly underway!

Firstly, their Twitter account is now available to follow, @officialavatar – Tweeting all things avatar!

They have also released a fantastic interactive trailer for people to download, giving insights into the creation, development and launch of the mammoth film as well as all of the current trailers on offer!

This content rich app is available to download here

I know i’m ready for the release of this film, there’s no doubt it’s going to be a revolutionary masterpiece – for all of you interested in the trailers, check this one out. It rocks!

Are you looking forward to Avatar’s release? Have you checked out all the trailers? Let us know your thoughts on James Cameron’s Avatar.

On November the 17th, Xbox live users will receive their free dashboard upgrade which will integrate Twitter, Facebook, Last FM and other social media platforms into their Xbox live functionality.

This update is also set to unclude a new Zune Video area which enhances the current video marketplace, allowing users to stream media once purchased instead of having to wait for the download.

If your under 18, you’re going to have to wait for a parental control patch, as there are currently none with the new update – however, Microsoft are currently working on getting these finished so that users under 18 will be able to Tweet freely then.

Are you an Xbox Live user? Do you think you’ll be engaging your social media from your Xbox? Let us know.

So – I thought i’d construct a guide to making the most of your blog ranging from getting your content picked up by the search engines to plugins and SEO. Enjoy.

Why a blog?

I’m sure you already know the answer to this as you’ve made one. If you’ve made one simply to keep up with the latest trend or of you’re contemplating making one then there’s lots for you to learn about why blogs are the cutting edge of ‘web 2.0. – and how you can get the most out of what you publish, understand the benefits of publishing it and the after effects.

Blogs are different to websites – in my opinion, they are the evolution of the hard coded website. Blogs allow for maximum customization ranging from visual templates to cool widgets in your sidebar. You can really customize your blog to exactly how you want it to look to fit in with its purpose. They can be professional sites for massive businesses or fun places for your rants and thoughts.

Blogs allow for extensive feedback methods. With social media fronting the development of marketing and the Internet as a whole – this means your in the best place to engage your readers. You’ll notice that after every post you make people are able to write comments. This is highly valuable in order to gain feedback for your content and encourage discussion.

The more user interaction that there is for your posts, the higher value that these posts become within the search engines – but we’ll go into that later on. For more info on blogs, read my Blog Optimization post.

What is your blogs purpose?

Do you want maximum readership? Do you want to cause controversy? Do you want to target a niche audience? Do you want to make money?

Depending on the purpose of your blog, you’ll want to grow it differently. For example – this blog is all about Social Media & Digital Marketing – I write frequent and quality posts in order to inform, gain feedback from others and learn myself – it’s about content that is professional and is very open to interpretation, allowing for discussion and conflicting ideas.

If your blog is designed to make money, then you may publish content that is very broad and falls under many categories in order to gain maximum readership and therefore higher conversions through affiliate marketing or Google Adsense.

Overall, the content of your blog needs to reflect its purpose, you need to think about the people who will read it, where they hang out on the web, the writing style they will appreciate and the design that they will find most attractive.

I recently overhauled Wrigged Media’s blog design to present higher clarity and a cleaner design – to fit in with my content and feedback from readers.

The search engines

The search engines are the most powerful gateway to your blog. Google is the biggest search engine in the world – so it’s crucial that you take steps in order to ensure that Google picks up your blog in the correct way.

Google crawls the web constantly picking up new websites and listing them in their search engine, findable when people search for certain keywords.

You’ll want to choose what keywords Google pairs with your blog In order to control your targeted traffic. For example, Wrigged Media is searchable with the key words ‘social media’ ‘social media marketing’ ‘marketing blog’ ‘digital marketing’ etc.

The benefit from doing this is that you can control the traffic that visits your site from the search engines by controlling what keywords people find your blog with. I’ll know that if people have found my blog when searching for ‘social media marketing’ that they’ve come with an interest with what I’m writing about.

The first step to make sure that you’re being searched for the right things is to make sure the title of all your posts are concise, accurate and contain keywords. This post is titled ‘Your first blog – tips and advice’ so when this post gets idexed by Google, people searching for ‘blog advice’ or ‘first blog tips’ will hopefully find me and find this post useful.

In order to appear higher up the search results that Google presents is to have more contextual links pointing your way – but that’s quite advanced for now, but I’ll do a post on that later on.

The ways to make sure that your blog is picked indexed by Google in the correct way is called SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. It’s all about ensuring your titles are accurate, your headings in the body text are accurate and that the body content is unique and engaging.

I’ll actually write a full Blog SEO post in the near future with lots more detail.

Social Media Integration

So, you have your flashy, shiny, Web 2.0 ready blog – but how do you integrate it into peoples Digital Doorsteps?

A lot of you will know what Twitter is. Twitter is a real time ‘microblogging’ site  -allowing for users to publish short, real time updates as to what they’re doing. It’s an incredibly powerful marketing tool, which is explained further in my Twitter Marketing post.

Making sure that your content has the best chance of being ‘retweeted’ and published on Facebook is a great way to bring in new readers. Install a‘Tweet me’  or ‘Facebook’ plug in – which allows for readers to ‘tweet’ and ‘publish’ your post at the simple click of a button.

Also, integrate a social plugin, allowing for people to instantly socially bookmark your content, publish it on Facebook, Digg it, Furl it, etc – there are loads. It’s basically all about making sure your content is as shareable as possible with as little effort needed as possible.

However ultimately it comes down to you writing content that will be worthy of sharing. You can supply the reader with as many ways to share it as you can, but if the content isn’t that great, the people won’t share it. So make sure the quality is there first.

To Finish – for now

I’m kinda putting my neck on the line here – as I’ve bashed out a post on how to optimize your blog, do this, do that bla bla – so I’m kinda hoping that this post and my other content is also worthy of my words.

Wrigged media my newest project, so I’m still carrying this all out for this site – however, I’ve done it all before for my previous blogs.

I’d like to say right now that if anyone would like to know anything extra about each category I’ve briefly covered here please email me at info@wriggedmedia.co.uk – or sit tight, as individual posts will be published soon covering each heading discussed in this post!

If you found this remotely interesting, please feel free to tweet it, comment, disagree, agree – I’d love to know your thoughts!

Gaming Alerts are one of the biggest online portals providing the latest gambling news & promotions. Being a heavily journalistic company and having a profile of blogs already established, Social Media implementation meant that we could provide multiple new channels of distribution for the published media to a real time audience, suggesting micro blogging as the perfect social media solution to begin with.

This Social Media implementation is very direct response based, providing real time click back data, tracking and statistics showing the interest that the social media platforms audience showed to a particular story. Meanwhile, we use a designated social account as an agent to converse with influential figures and people with an interested in Gaming Alerts or it’s Micro environment.

As it was the first time we had integrated Gaming Alerts into social media, we embarked on running a special Twitter campaign with Ladbrokes Casino, in order to create ‘buzz’ and content for people to tweet / write about. This raised our social profile within our media platforms and creating a foothold to continue with as well as gaining extensive media coverage through the forms of press releases and retweets.

With the online gambling industry saturated with thousands of promotions, the signal to noise ratio for this project was inevitably going to be high, however through taking a two pronged approach to the social media for Gaming Alerts we were able to introduce both a promotional presence to Twitter and a conversational approach.

Each have their own benefits, and provide both the consumer and B2B players with different offerings.

Conversational: GA_Social

Promotional: Gaming_Alerts

Due to Gaming Alerts operating in such a competitive market, there were bound to be problems establishing the social media platforms. The main Issue in Twitter was the ability for our genuine promotional tweets leading back to quality published articles penetrating the spam tweets set by robot accounts to occur a certain amount of times per hour.

This made it hard for genuine users, interested in the latest ‘Gaming Alerts’ to find us and follow us.

From this it was necessary to accept that the noise in the public timeline shrouding our tweets from consumer searches was out of our control, and hence the Social twitter account was born. This twitter account is in operation to find conversations to direct people to appropriate material published on Gaming Alerts and works in conjunction with the promotional account.

With a personal touch and a degree of transparency & sincerity, this is successful in building authority to members on Twitter in regards to Gaming Alerts and their published content. It also directed users to us with a far greater conversion potential, through involving ourselves with appropriate conversations and interacting with influential tweeters in the industry.

With search engines placing more and more weighting to real time updates, such as those in Twitter – it’s important for us to keep the promotional account running, as for consumers searching engines such as BingTweets which feature live update listings, they will be able to find tweets from Gaming Alerts containing promotions and stories.

Meanwhile the conversational account will remain an agent, seeking to create and involve itself in the conversations with users of Gaming Alerts’ Micro and Macro environment.

In the future we hope to integrate Gaming Alerts into further social media platforms to reach different segmented audiences & aim to carryout a detailed analysis of their social mediascape in order to better target and communicate with the right people.

To find out more information about the Social Media being developed for Gaming Alerts, e-mail us at info@wriggedmedia.co.uk

A micro blog gives the user the opportunity to post small, real time updates which get submitted to a public timeline, which is fully searchable with the use of keywords and tags.

A micro blog still bears similarity to a regular blog, in the way that posts are made, and published. However, a regular blog is formed through less frequent, longer and well constructed posts, where as a microblog post can be a small update telling users what the ‘deal of the day’ is.

Twitter is the most popular micro blogging service, which has revolutionised the way in which people share information and converse through the internet, it can even be described as the voice of the internet. It’s the first place in which you can find out what the world is talking about, through analysing the trending topics.

This is where Twitter can be used as a very powerful tool from a marketing point of view, with the ability to find out what the world is talking about you can also find out what the world has to say about your brand.

By integrating yourself into this social media platform, you are able to actively involve yourself with the conversations that the world is having about your Organisation and influence the outcomes of these conversations, be that positive or negative.

The idea is to be completely transparent to your publics, a point of honesty and trust to which your publics are able to feel comfortable interacting with, sharing feedback, likes, dislikes, and a channel through which you can supply information to the people who matter on a real time basis through short, 140 character ‘tweets’.

Many different companies have embraced Twitter in many different ways, ranging from a pure customer service tool dealing directly with consumers, to a tool used to inform followers of promotions & press releases to crazy marketing stunts – whatever your company does, there are bound to be conversations occurring about your brand to which you can be involved with – and if there aren’t, i’ts the perfect opportunity to give them something to talk about!

Overall, Twitter gives you the opportunity to listen to what people are saying about your company, learn about why they’re saying it and involve yourself with social engagement in order to influence these conversations on a real time basis whilst being a live point of contact for your publics.

With the right people, it can be customised to your brand and utilised as a powerful tool of public relations with limitless integration into a marketing campaign.

With the recent addition of Facebook Fan pages as a form of ‘company profile’ – how can you utilize this channel of social media in order to enhance your online marketing?

As said above, everyone has Facebook, therefore theoretically you have everyone on your digital doorstep, just waiting to become a fan of your page and get involved with your brand.

A Facebook page is literally just that, a highly interactive page, full of widgets, walls, pictures, boxes and comment systems allowing for fans of this page to find many different ways of posting, commenting, liking, hating, sharing and conversing, they  allow for you to take your brand, and make it transparent, open for praise & criticism on a completely 100% public level.

How does this benefit marketing?

Once your Facebook page has an established fan base, (It’s not a race) – then you have an audience to this page who have a vested interest in the things you post, your status updates and all other input you make to the page on behalf of your brand.

You are able to benefit from extensive interaction monitoring, allowing for you to accurately gauge activity within the page and learn all sorts about your audience from their demographics to what links / posts they ‘like’ the most.

Most of all it’s about being transparent for people with an interest in your brand to establish an honest reciprocal relationship with, and tailored correctly to your brand, a Facebook page can provide both promotional and conversational benefits to your organization.

For more information as to how Facebook Optimization can be used for your brand, email us at info@wriggedmedia.co.uk

How can a blog be integrated to digital marketing?

Unlike Twitter & Facebook, a blog isn’t a real time social media platform, so its updates are thought out, less frequent and rich in quality content (well…hopefully).

For businesses, this provides an updatable platform which can be divided between several desired sections. For example, a corporate blog & a consumer blog. Each serves its own purpose and can be utilized to publish regular and relevant information which can be commented on to gauge reactions.

Blogs are used by different organisations in different ways, some use their consumer blog to release breaking news & announcements, and some corporate blogs use their space for press releases and B2B news, but ultimately it completely depends on your brand, what information you want to share in what quantities to how many people!

For multi media publications, blogs are also perfect. They provide healthy SEO development for your brand and for many companies can act as the social anchor for all other social media pursuits which lead back to the blog.

The scope of customization for blogs also means that you’re able to make your companies blog consistent with your brand image and actively enhance it through well thought out, relevant and informative posts which provide decent readership for your publics.

Furthermore, blogs provide the perfect material to feed your real time Social Media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook updates, coupled with link tracking services, you can accurately monitor the interest your blog posts get from the Social Media Sphere and develop from the information you learn from this.

Do you want to know how a blog can help your brand? Email us at info@wriggedmedia.co.uk

What other benefits do blogs provide your brand? Feel free to post your thoughts below!